Reflective practice

Begin by reflecting upon the sorts of projects, exercises and assignments you have enjoyed most:

1. Do you enjoy the creative freedom of working with your own text and images from scratch, or do you prefer working with text and images that are provided to you?
2. Do you prefer working in a ‘hands-on’ way, physically manipulating paper and materials, or do you prefer working digitally, laying out the pages and page elements on-screen? Which of the subjects covered in this unit have interested and engaged you?Below are some pointers of what has been covered in this unit, as a reminder. They are very broad areas, so as you’re reading through the list, reflect upon the more extensive content of each. Consider what aspects you enjoyed the most (and the least!) and make notes in your learning log.

• Contextualisation:​ Researching designs and designers 
• Typography:​ Principles and experimentation
• Colour:​ Colour management and working with images 
• Paper:​ Properties and qualities
• Printing and bookbinding: ​Processes – traditional, digital

Try to identify a specific topic within one of these subject areas that you are interested in and can look into with more detail. You might know immediately and instinctively what you want to pursue. You may want to know more about traditional methods of bookbinding, for example, or hand-making paper. You may be interested in the mathematical principles underpinning the Golden Mean and Fibonacci series, and how these principles apply to page layout. You may want to design your own typeface. You may want to extend and adapt one of the projects and exercises you’ve already undertaken on the course. The focus of your interest may be quite specific. Identify it through this exercise by exploring each of your interests in turn and taking note of your resulting thoughts in your learning log.

Reflection

Looking back on previous parts of the unit I found that I am definitely more accustomed to to working digitally than physically. I struggled a lot with the parts of the unit that required producing something physical especially the altered book unit. I did enjoy the physical research into paper types as this gave me more of an insight into paper processes, the types of products available and print production.

Specific parts of the course I have enjoyed are:

Part 1: The Future Book. This was one of the early exercises that I liked. I played to my strengths in this exercise but produced the final design in a different way, which was well received by my tutor and my peers.

Part 2: Book Designers. This research-heavy exercise was quite daunting in the number of designers to research. However, I enjoyed learning more around the approaches that different designers have and how these influenced the final product.

Part 2: Designing a cover & Form and Function. These were probably up there as some of my favourite parts of the course. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating alternative covers for The Handmaid’s Tale and then taking this forward for Robinson Crusoe and producing different variants before deciding on the final design.

All of Part 3: As with my previous module, GDCC1, I feel drawn to the world of typography. This is where my strength lies and the part of design that interests me the most. I think the most difficult part of this part was designing the ‘bad’ typography book for the assignment, which went against everything I know about typography and this stifled my response a little.

Part 4: Concrete Poetry. It took a while to get my head around this exercise, but once I did I enjoyed myself. The exercise lent itself to typography and, as mentioned before, this was my strength. However, generating images for the second part of the exercise gave me the chance to play in Photoshop a little(I predominantly work in Illustrator) and create some fun and intriguing imagery.

The parts I didn’t like I have mentioned above. They were the ones that forced me to work in a more physical way, which I didn’t enjoy and I feel that these parts of the module I struggled with the most and found it hard to motivate myself to start them.

This module has helped me to build on my knowledge of layout and print design which I have already found very useful. It has made me think a lot more about colour management, page layout and print finishes which will hopefully go towards my final assignment. I now have a fascination with paper types and the processes they are used for and have amassed a large number of sample books!